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This chapter discusses poverty alleviation efforts in India. Eradication of poverty has long been the overarching objective of Indian economic development. All the pre-independence plans for Indian development, including those of the National Planning Committee, M. Visveswaraya, and the Indian Federation of Labour, identified poverty as the central problem of the Indian economy. However, even after nearly fifty years of planning, more than a third of India's population still has a monthly consumption below the extremely modest poverty line. This chapter suggests that anti-poverty programmes...

This chapter discusses poverty alleviation efforts in India. Eradication of poverty has long been the overarching objective of Indian economic development. All the pre-independence plans for Indian development, including those of the National Planning Committee, M. Visveswaraya, and the Indian Federation of Labour, identified poverty as the central problem of the Indian economy. However, even after nearly fifty years of planning, more than a third of India's population still has a monthly consumption below the extremely modest poverty line. This chapter suggests that anti-poverty programmes that either do not reach the poor or bestow disproportionate benefits to the non-poor should be reformed. It explains that a majority of India's safety-net initiatives are misusing scarce financial resources that could be best invested to increase the poor's access to health and education services that have been shown to equip the poor to help themselves.